Elon Musk says that the environment would be fine if we doubled our population | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk says that the environment would be fine if we doubled our population

businessinsider.com

Why do we report on this nonsense? Musk has no idea what he's talking about. He has a shallow understanding of technical topics and knows enough buzzwords to trick laypeople into thinking he's some kind of generational genius who can master a dozen sciences with no education.

Sure we could double the human population, but it all depends on where we cluster and how much of a drop in standard of living people are willing to put up with.

Doubling the population would almost certainly increase the average standard of living, as there would be more people to create said standard.

Malthus was wrong 80% of the population ago, and he still is wrong today, for all that he continually finds new followers.

Where’s double of the food (and shipping thereof) coming from? At the moment, various grain producing regions are either having issues buying fertilizer or have excessively iron rich soil. And I assume we’re not going to need 2x animals for meat, then.

That would be a problem if the population doubled tomorrow magically, but not if it happened through ordinary growth. We are presently using both the smallest number of people and the smallest share of land for food production at any time in history.

The reason we're struggling right now has nothing to do with the food-production capacity of the planet. It's all a combination of sudden supply shocks and governments being stupid and destructive.

> We are presently using [..] the smallest share of land for food production [than] at any time in history.

per person. In absolute terms (the only terms that matter to the environment), it is by far the largest. Every time the population has grown so far, our impact on the environment has increased. But for some reason, you think this time will be different?

No, we are actually using fewer people and less land in total for farming than at any time in history.

Well, not "in history", but certainly in the last 2000 years.

This is fantastically incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_land#Area shows the history of agricultural land growth.

The current widespread destruction of the environment is directly caused by the human population and compounded by increased living standards.

If population doubled the planet would be destroyed and/or we would survive in minuscule pods and eat bland mush to survive.

This is not the same as Malthus' thesis. We are producing enough food and we would probably still do. The issue is the cost in terms of environmental destruction and quality of life.

> current widespread destruction of the environment

Have a look at the early industrial period or even the 1970s, and then have a look out the window again. There's a bit of a [citation needed] on that claim.

(just this week, for example, there was a study that showed that a major contributor to the increase in the severity of the Atlantic hurricane season in the last decade has been the great reduction in atmospheric pollution)

Elon Musk runs his mouth without engaging his brain. The environment isn't fine now, and would definitely be less fine if the population doubled.

I wish our governments acted like it, instead of pushing for constant population growth "for the economy".

Whose governments are you talking about? The EU predicts that the aggregate population of its member states will peak in 2026:

> The EU-27’s population is projected to increase from 446.8 million in 2019 and peak to 449.3 million in 2026 (+0.6 %), then gradually decrease to 441.2 million in 2050 and to 416.1 million in 2100, thus with an overall decrease of 30.8 million (-6.9 %) from 2019 to 2100

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

The USA's:

It’s clear that fixing our broken immigration system would boost our economy and help all workers by increasing the worker productivity, creating more jobs, improving wages of all workers, and reducing the deficit. - https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/issues/immigration/econ...

Biden: We need ‘constant, unrelenting stream’ of immigrants - https://thehill.com/regulation/business/208857-biden-hails-c...

Canada's:

Canada’s successive governments have relied on immigration to drive economic growth in the face of a declining fertility rate, which hit a record low last year. [..] “Canada needs immigration to create jobs and drive our economic recovery,” Immigration Minister Sean Fraser told Reuters. - https://www.reuters.com/article/canada-economy-immigration-h...

Federal government plans to bring in more than 1.2M immigrants in next 3 years - https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mendicino-immigration-pande...

Australia's:

If Australia doesn't have a radical surge in immigration, what will happen to the economy? - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-22/if-australia-doesnt-h...

This is coming from the media, not government, but govt. policy reflected that, with such high levels of immigration that 28% of Australia's population was immigrant in 2015 [1]. They remained high until COVID.

Germany's:

According to your estimates, the German economy will need 400,000 immigrants each year to remain competitive. [..] Your research shows that in 20 years, one in three people in Germany will have a migrant background. - https://www.dw.com/en/germany-needs-immigrants-to-stay-compe...

You get the picture.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AUS/australia/immigrat...

A decade or so ago, Musk sounded reasonable. What has happened to make him so batshit crazy?

Billions of dollars, millions of rabid fans, incessant media attention?

Why are his fans so rabid anyway? I noticed it several years ago, but they seem to have gotten significantly worse recently.

My uneducated guess is that it's a combination of:

- sense of community

- feeling like he (and by extension, his fans) know something that "experts" and "the mainstream" don't know

- existing car enthusiast culture that grafted onto Tesla and then onto Musk himself

- Tony Stark/Iron Man myth that people started to project onto him

- bots

Ugh, such clickbait

Reply on news.ycombinator.com